The Hardness Outside Me (and the softness within)

Happy New Year

Me, waiting for the Amtrak train, about age 5 (circa 1988)

~Please consider purchasing my new essay collection, Controversial: The Substack Essays, Polemics 2022-2024 (click here)

It’s 8:53am, December 30, 2024. January 7^th will be four months that we’ve lived here in Portland. It feels—and in a good way—like it’s been more like a year at least. I think because so much has happened the past six months, the past two years, the past five years, etc.

Living in Lompoc (an hour north of the beautiful, paradisaical Santa Barbara) was akin, to me, to living in a prison. That’s exaggeration, of course—a writer is nothing without his drama—but not by a terribly large amount.

We moved to Portland September 7^th, 2024. Several days before that our beloved Border-Collie mix suddenly died at the mature age of 14 or 15 (we aren’t totally certain of his age). Britney had been his owner for about 13 years, since her mid-twenties. They’d done everything together: Hiking all over California, travel, parties, you name it. He was her best friend in all ways conceivable. I only got to know him for two years but in that time I fell deeply in love with him. Losing him was incredibly painful. Britney wept like I’d never thought possible. He let us know it was time.

We’d also left Britney’s house in Lompoc—she’s owned it since 2013—the town she’s lived her whole life in. The alcohol and drug rehab center across the street from her house used to be a hospital: Her father was born there, she was born there, her son was born there. She extends back through the generations. Lompoc is a small, sleepy agricultural town right off Pacific Coast Highway, off U.S. Highway 101. I’d driven past the sign for the town hundreds of times as a youth driving up from Ojai, where I grew up, or south from San Francisco. But only when I fell for Britney did I experience the town and learn to know it.

The story of me and Britney—still together now only 2.4 years—is the story of change. Neither of us thought we’d necessarily ever get married, and if we did we both figured it’d be much later in life. (It was already later than most.) On some level I’m certain Britney wondered if she might live for the rest of her life in her small, physically gorgeous town.

As for me I’d unexpectedly left Manhattan in the summer of 2021 thinking I was just visiting California for the summer. But then my father was diagnosed with stage four Melanoma and my life cracked open. Twenty-three months later, after my mother and I cared for the man I’d all my life struggled to understand and know, my father died on June 2^nd, 2023.

And all the while I was in love.

I left Santa Barbara for Lompoc an hour north while my father was still alive. I traveled back and forth ceaselessly along Highway 101 between the two towns. Remember that scene in the 1967 classic film The Graduate towards the end when Dustan Hoffman is driving his red Alfa Romeo south to Santa Barbara? (In real life he was driving north from Santa Barbara through the tunnel towards Lompoc.) That’s the tunnel I drove through hundreds of times on my way back from S.B. to Lompoc.

Lompoc was a lovely town filled with kind people but it wasn’t the place for me. No one seemed to read. Trumpers were omnipresent. Everything closed early. I didn’t detect any real “culture.” It was barren fields and Highway 246 and PCH and not much else. There was some hiking, that is true. Once we backpacked not far from the town.

Then our plans for Spain began. That was probably a year-and-a-half ago now, when we first started considering moving abroad. My dad was still alive then. Since that time it seems we’ve aged a million years, not physically but emotionally, spiritually. Only when we left the town and moved to Portland—selling my Bay Area house and buying a multi-unit in PDX—did we actually start the immigration process, and it’s been a journey the past four months. We’re finally getting close. Our official move date to Madrid is April 1^st, 2025. We have an Air BnB apartment all ready for us and our three wild, unruly cats.

Like all marriages, we have our issues. How could we not? We’re human, for one thing, and only-children for another. But more than that: We’re both wounded, intense, sensitive people who have Big Pasts and past trauma. We’re not unique, of course: Who doesn’t have some kind of trauma? Being alive is traumatic on some level. We’re not victims; we’re victors: We have transcended the hardest stuff.

And our lives, at least externally, were easier than our parents’ lives, and easier by light years than our grandparents’ lives. (Especially Britney’s Okinawan grandmother, who is nearly 90 and experienced many profound hardships as a girl living in caves. She was eight when the bombs were dropped on Japan.) My maternal grandfather struggled through the Depression, a poor boy in Texas with an alcoholic father, and my mother spent two years as a teen in a public psych ward. We’re all lucky to be alive.

There are those who prefer to talk about their pain, their pasts, and those who do not. I’m of the first order. I’m a talker, a writer. I want to know you. I want all the deep juicy details. I don’t want to control your perception of me. I don’t care what you think (and yet of course I do). Look at me and you’ll see what I prioritize and what I don’t. I care little about the clothes I wear. Money is symbolic to me more than anything else. I’d rather travel than receive a physical gift. Books are more crucial to me than fame. Writing is the language I speak, and I voice my values and spiritual destitution through my thick fingers against a faded black keyboard.

Worrying about what the neighbors think has never been important to me. How I appear is boring. The big house, the expensive car, the yacht, etc: I have never been interested in these things. Probably on some level it’s because I came from money that I rejected money. Because of who I am inside; because of the soul which owns me. I have always been full to the brim with vitality and vigor, only needing myself and my senses and a book and some paper to write on. It is in life’s essential simplicity that I have always thrived. It’s true that I am deeply insecure, that I want to be liked, adored, respected and cherished. It’s true that I have an ego the size of Russia. It’s true that I want attention. It’s true that I am emotionally needy.

It's equally true that I respect myself, even when I piss myself off due to my compulsive behavior, my selfishness, my angry and violent thoughts which I’ve strangely never been able to fully mute, my sordid and sometimes reprehensible past. Within me there exists, as Bukowski said in his famous poem, a bluebird, loving and compassionate and soft and kind, but, as Bukowski poured beer on his inner bird, I pour rage and political polemics. But I have always been a kind man deep down inside, underneath the shame, guilt, fear and insecurity.

The shame, guilt and insecurity stem from my childhood, from being too needy and sensitive for this challenging, rock-hard world. Even now I sometimes feel this way, the Little Michael, as some therapists have said, blushing with wounded pride, too scared to fess up to his doings.

I am, of course, in the end a good man. Perhaps I need to say that out loud—write that—as a daily reminder. There’s a reason I’ve been sober over 14 years (four years longer than I drank). It’s because spiritually-speaking I reached the point of no return, and in order to find myself again I had to cut away the old skin of my youth. I did that and here I am.

Today is my birthday. I am 42 years old. I was born at 1:11pm, New Year’s Eve, December 31^st, 1982. Just under ten pounds; broke my mom’s tailbone. Surely some kind of sign, right? That I had entered the world and was not to be tangled with. That I had things to say, a path, a cross to carry, a violent vision of myself.

This is my vision. This writing. This calling I have chased. This burden I have carried.

Happy New Year, everyone.